Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL)

Anant Agarwal, president of edX, the worldwide, online learning initiative of MIT and Harvard University and professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). He is recognized “for contributions to shared-memory and multicore computer architectures.”

Trying to build a new circuit that would use an emerging technology called compressed sensing has taken on a renewed focus under the work of members of the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at MIT including EECS graduate student Omid Abari. With researchers in the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT (RLE) and in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) Obari is seeking to balance theory with chip building realities using new evaluation algorithms to allow creation of the ideal circuit.

With the fall 2012 launch of the bigdata@csail center, which represents a focused effort to understand and put to good use the huge amounts of data generated all the time, a handful of members of the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at MIT are contributing specifically to medical applications. The MIT News Office has featured the work of Peter Szolovits, John Guttag, Alan Willsky and -- perhaps at the heart of abstractly looking at big data and medicine -- former EECS undergraduate and masters degree student David Rashef, now an MD/PhD student with the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology (HST) program. Read more...

In March 2011, Scott Aaronson, MIT associate professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department (EECS) and principal investigator in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) working with EECS graduate student Alex Arkhipov proposed the creation of a first step towards quantum computing -- an optical experiment that would demonstrate the feasibility of quantum computing. Four distinct research groups, which undertook Aaronson and Arkhipov's proposed experiment in December 2012, are now reporting the results.

In 2002 MIT Laboratory for Computer Science researchers Karen Sollins and David Clark (along with co-authors John Wroclawski and Bob Braden, with the USC Information Sciences Institute) published and presented a paper to an Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) SIGCOMM conference titled "Tussle in Cyberspace: Defining Tomorrow's Internet." Due to the enduring nature of their discussion and the fact the paper was shared with an ACM conference, it is now being recognized with the ACM's Test of Time award ten years later.

Electrical engineering and computer science graduate student Bernhard Haeupler, student of MIT EECS Department faculty Muriel Medard, and David Karger, won one of two best student paper awards at the ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms this month for his work creating a reliable algorithm that delivers messages in decentralized networks, that have unknown shapes. By making this algorithm deterministic - rather than probalistic - the message will reach all nodes, guaranteeing delivery. [Graphic courtesy of Christine Daniloff, MIT News Office.]